Stories by Thomas Wailgum

ERP combines software systems from departments like finance, human resources and warehouse management into a single, integrated software program that runs off a single database so that the various departments can more easily share information and collaborate. It's a tall order, but that integrated approach can have a tremendous payback if companies install the software correctly.

I hadn't heard the term &quot;AltaVista&quot; in more than a decade, hadn't thought about one of the first search engines that everyone used, hadn't reminisced about the mid-1990s and the excitement that gripped the world when we started getting to know this thing called the World Wide Web.Then this morning, I read that Yahoo! was &quot;sunsetting&quot; AltaVista.

Greenpeace has released the fourth version of its Cool IT Leaderboard and Cisco, Ericsson and Fujitsu ranked atop the list of 17 global high-tech companies.&quot;The Cool IT leaderboard evaluates global IT companies on their leadership in the fight to stop climate change,&quot; notes the announcement. &quot;The IT sector possesses the innovative spirit, technological know-how and political influence to bring about a rapid clean energy revolution.&quot;

For most people in the United States and several million others around the globe, February 7, 2010, was a day to sit back on the couch and enjoy another Super Bowl Sunday.For Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe, two rising executives at SAP, it was a day that would change their lives forever: SAP announced on that Sunday that the pair would replace CEO Léo Apotheker as co-CEOs of the enterprise software behemoth.

You have to feel bad for most retailers: The global economy tanked in 2008, sales plummeted and many well-known chains went out of business. Today, shoppers have come to expect half-price sales on nearly everything in stock.All the while, retailers have had deal with perceived consumer demand for &quot;green everything&quot;: environmentally friendly products and stores as well as transparent sustainability efforts to reduce power consumption and harmful waste in their operations and supply chains.

When purchasing <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/40323">ERP software</a>, companies today have a plethora of critical decisions to make. They must consider the differences in vendors' features and functionalities, <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/618117">support and license costs</a>, <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/598409">TCO and ROI estimates</a>, underlying technical architectures and future roadmaps, just to name a few.

So much in the high-tech world that should be factually airtight-as in: it's either 4G speed or it's not-is, instead, always up for marketing's misappropriation, your CEO's hyperbolic exaggeration or a sales rep's truth bending.In other words, the true meaning for some technologies or services is that it depends on who you are talking to.

Every Thursday afternoon at 1:30 p.m., Tom Uva's senior IT team gathers in his office. They do not assemble to shoot the breeze or grumble about the potent weather in Syracuse, N.Y., where their company, Sensis, an aerospace and defense manufacturer selling to a host of three-letter acronym U.S. government agencies, is headquartered.Uva's team congregates weekly to discuss the status of each and every business project that has an IT component. The assemblage consists of the leaders of the CIO's five groups that comprise Sensis Corporate Technology Solutions (CTS): Business Solutions, which covers apps and data management; a network ops team; Client Services, responsible for all IT activities for the Sensis user community; Information Protection, or security; and &quot;Run as a Business,&quot; which is responsible for such jobs as the IT group's own financials, vendor management and training programs.

One critiOne critical shortage in the supply chain right now has nothing to do with Apple iPhones, Nintendo Wiior Zhu Zhu Pets being out of stock for the holidays: It's the people who manage companies' supply chains.

In the new book The CIO Edge: Seven Leadership Skills You Need to Drive Results, the trio of authors argue that CIOs' leadership and people skills are the biggest determinate of their success - or failure.The book, written by Graham Waller of Gartner Executive Programs, and Korn/Ferry's George Hallenbeck and Karen Rubenstrunk (formerly with Korn/Ferry's CIO practice), doesn't downplay the fact that CIOs still need to be operationally sound: keeping the proverbial trains running on time while managing to tight budgets.

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